There's much I've not touched on, eg recombinant DNA & the genome project. But I've taxed your attention enough.

I am now revising the manuscript of my biography of Watson. Working title: American Icarus. It will be out with Basic Books in late '26–early '27.

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Race was the issue that exposed the bankruptcy of Watson's genetic determinism. In the 20th century, he made his reputation by staunchly championing the power of DNA. In the 21st, he torpedoed that reputation the same way. That is the great tragedy of James Watson.

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I don't see evidence that Watson hated Blacks. He was a man of enormous privilege and proudly elitist. Black people were just not on his radar. I do see evidence that he believed in the power of DNA to an almost religious degree.

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In 1994, Matt Ridley introduced him to The Bell Curve. It married genetic determinism about IQ, which Watson believed 100%, with racism, which he didn't interrogate. Had he read the papers cited in TBC, he would have seen that it was pseudoscience. This he did not do.

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In the US, though, he had almost no contact w/ Black people outside the service industry. Black students were horrifically underrepresented in higher ed and nonexistent at places like Harvard, Caltech, and Indiana. Personal contact is a great antiserum for racism. Watson never had it.
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The Ugandan prof wrote that Watson was "particularly keen on student contact… Throughout his visit he showed a great interest in the teaching and research being carried out at Makerere and at all times he was a most courteous and thought-provoking visitor.”

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The Ford sponsored him for a 6-week tour of schools and universities in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia. Afterward, a professor from Makerere University, in Kampala, wrote one of many glowing letters to the Ford Fndn about Watson's visit....

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Watson's racism is more complex. In 1965, he proposed to the Ford Fndn a kind of Peace Corps for scientists, in which grad students would spend a year or 2 in Africa, lecturing, tutoring, and advising students. African educators were enthusiastically supportive, as was the Ford Fndn.
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Watson was sexist in an old-fashioned, paternalistic sense. Patronizingly, he loved pretty girls for the "sparkle" they added to life. But he took women intellectuals, esp scientists, as seriously as men. Unlike Crick, he never harassed women and never cheated on his wife.

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Over multiple drafts, his familiar portrait of dowdy, humorless "Rosy" emerged. I don't like that passage any more than you do. My point is that the Rosy character was a writing decision (a poor one, IMO), not an impassioned character assassination.

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In the 2nd draft, he wrote, "The decisive factor [in hiring Franklin] was probably her brains. She was no fool and definitely knew how to take x-ray diffraction pictures. In fact, within several months of her arrival at King’s College she was taking better pictures than Maurice."
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E.g., his notorious portrait of "Rosy." The 1st draft introduces her straight: Wilkins persuaded Randall "to hire a professional x-ray crystallographer... Their choice was a woman trained in Cambridge and with several years experience after her PhD. Her name was Rosalind Franklin."
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His next book, The Double Helix, is NOT a straight-faced memoir. He portrayed himself as snarky, lazy, oversexed, and dishonest, for laughs and to show students that science could be mischievous, playful, fun. It worked. In my book, I trace key passages through multiple drafts.
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Watson's over-simplification of Crick's Central Dogma is thus responsible for the mistaken belief in 1970 that reverse transcriptase contradicted it! See doi:10.1038/227561a0

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Watson became an empire builder. He wanted to own mol bio. His textbook, Mol Bio of the Gene ('65), was perfectly timed and met w/ huge acclaim. Roughly everyone who was taught mol bio in mid-60s–1980s learned Watson's vision of it. Including the errors!
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Because they were doing biochem, unlike the Cambridge and Pasteur Inst. grps, the Watson lab weren't blindsided by Nirenberg's cracking of the genetic code in 1961. The story of Nirenberg as a "dark horse" is a distortion, Brenner+Crick's view.
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The Watson group's paper on mRNA was not a runner-up. Brenner & Jacob wrote a quick paper w/o telling the others. Watson complained on behalf of his students. Brenner & Jacob agreed, apologized. They published 2 papers back-back. Watson's grp also did key work on ribosome struct/fnxn.
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At Harvard, Watson built a big lab that become one of the central nodes in a network of labs attacking protein synthesis. S. Brenner & F. Jacob get rightful credit for discovering mRNA, but as @matthewcobb.bsky.social has shown, it was really a group of ≈9 ppl. 3 were in Watson's lab.
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The double helix gave Watson a burst of notoriety. The highlight of which by far was presenting the structure at the 1953 CSH Symposium. He then dropped DNA completely. He was 1 of the 1st to see that protein synth was next big problem of mol bio & spent the next 10 yrs on RNA.

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